Imperialism and the Assault on the People’s Welfare

N.K. Bhattacharyya

Recently a Joint Parliamentary Committee was asked to
investigate the report published by the Centre of Science and Environment (CSE),
a Delhi based scientific research organisation, that there was pesticide in the
soft drinks produced and marketed by two USA based MNCs – Coca Cola and Pepsi
Cola while the same product produced in their own country had no such poisons
that can slowly kill human being. The committee found the report of CSE as
scientifically valid and requested the government to do the needful. CSE also
reported that the bottled drinking water sold in the market under different
brand names was also harmful to human beings. What is surprising is that the
competent authorities and the concerned ministers are hand in glove with the
mafia who are minting money in India selling simple poisons to the people,
specially to the children and youth of this country. Can India ‘shine’ when
its people are consciously poisoned slowly by some money bags with the full
knowledge of the concerned authorities of the centre and the states? The amount
of bribes collected from these business houses can be easily imagined. The
government is advertising every day through multi crore ads the various
achievements of various departments of the Vajpayee government.

The Planning

Commission which virtually stopped preparation of plans worth
mentioning for the country after presentation of the 2nd Five Year Plan document
in the sixties is also advertising that it is still alive and not dead. Vajpayee
utterly failed to inform people of this country that there is no safe drinking
water anywhere in the country either in the urban or rural sectors even after so
many decades of independence. He claims that he is in Parliament for so many
decades, but what has he done for safe drinking water? Why his information and
broadcasting ministry should not be banned for its failure to inform the people
what liquids we are drinking and what is its effect on human and animal health.
The Ministry of Information Technology and Communication is proud of selling
mobile phones in thousands but it fails to inform people where in India one can
find safe drinking water from Ladakh to Kanyakumari and from Porbandar to the
border of Nagaland. Only on this one issue he should ask his colleagues to
apologise before the country.

At the same time both the centre and the states are
instructed to privatise water supply systems as per the recommendation of the
World Bank. Rivers are handed over to private companies and they are selling
water. Cultivators are denied river water by these companies as that water was
used exclusively for industrial purpose. Foreign companies are given jobs to
supply drinking water even knowing fully well that such experiments failed in
many developing countries and people have thrown those companies out of their
countries. Look at the Jamuna, which flows through Delhi only in the rainy
season; otherwise, it remains stagnant throughout the year, it is virtually a
sewage drain carrying filth. This is the condition of capital where both the
central government, and the state government function from the same town and
both can’t do anything to clean a river from dense pollutants. However, Centre
is spending crores on the beautification of both sides of the river Jamuna
without telling people where the river is, it is simply an interstate sewage
drain. In this manner almost all the rivers in India carry more toxic matter
than clean water. There is no authority to see that rivers carry only clean
water. When a discussion was going on in the Supreme Court on the pollution of
the Jamuna, the Vajpayee government in a pre-planned manner brought in most
innocently a solution to the Jamuna problem by suggesting a mega project called
the ‘interlinking of rivers in India’ which would take 43 years to complete
and cost Rs 156000 crores. The then Chief Justice in whose court this issue was
raised by the government insisted that it should be completed within 10 and not
43 years. The next day when this chief justice retired a reporter asked him what
would happen to his order on the interlinking of rivers he simply denied it and
said there was no such order, it was just an observation, but the matter is
being pursued by the court religiously without studying in depth what this
project is all about. The beauty is that the President and Prime Minister of
India are regularly campaigning for the interlinking of rivers without telling
people why this project is being pushed by them. Do they require the consent of
the people or not before the project is launched. How far is such a project
beneficial to the country? Who will implement it and so on. What is most
important is how a project which was scheduled for 43 years was packed into a 10
year project and how will the government finance such a mega project. To arrange
Rs 156000 crores for a country with less than $500 per capita income and an
already external debt of more than US $112 billion is not a matter of a joke.
Are they serious about this project, as they are already in an utter mess
implementing the mega road project implemented through National Highway
Authority of India (NHAI). This is now a haven of the mafia raj who are
empowered to kill honest engineers with the full knowledge of the Prime Minister’s
Office and the concerned Central Minister. What happened to the river clearing
projects like the Ganga Action and Jamuna Action Plans which were backed by
foreign funding and started in the mid eighties? Is the government accountable
to the people?

Ms Uma Bharati, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh is
specially fond of the cow which is the darling of the ‘hindutva brand’ and
she created saffron history by forming for the first time in India a special
ministry to look after cows only. In the west we have ‘cow disease’ even
there we don’t have any special minister to look after cattle. Now we have ‘bird
flu’ in different parts of India, there is till to-day no special ministry in
the centre to save either the birds or human beings so that it does not take on
disastrous proportions as in South East Asia. It is said that all the Central
Ministers are in the queue before the advertising agency to get their photos
printed in media advertisement at the cost of taxpayers’ money; let the birds
and people take care of themselves! Ms Bharati must ensure that cows in her
state should not compete for food with dogs and beggars in the roadside garbage
bins and drink contaminated water from the gutter including that supplied by
bottling plants. The BJP thinks to let two legged creatures drink water mixed
with poison and die prematurely but the four legged should be protected at the
cost of poor tax payers!

The Human Resources Minister is also trying to create
history, of course saffron in colour. In a television interview on CNBC
recently, the central education (HRD) minister told the people for the first
time in history since the so called economic reform started in the early
nineties that he is having enough money to pay for all the demands of various
central government run educational institutions. He was discussing with the
reporter, his ministry’s order to the Indian Institute of Managements (IIMs)
to reduce fees to be collected from each student of IIM (Ahmedabad) from Rs 1.5
lakh to Rs 30,000 per annum and to increase the enrolment of IIM (Ahmedabad)
from 900 to 1800 per annum. This Rs 30,000 p.a. fee will be applicable to other
IIMs too. Such a highly educated minister of the Vajpayee government since 1999
allowed and encouraged these IIMs to fleece hundreds of students with fabulous
charges for a simple degree of master in business management. We cannot
understand why the centre had to wait long five years to tell such islands of
elite learning that we in India with a mere per capita per day income of not
more than one US $ can’t afford to run such high cost institutes at the
government’s expense. Such ministers got up from their deep sleep only 60 days
before the elections and just to gain some votes issued this order. These
ministers know very well that after the elections these institutions will revert
back to the old fee structure, probably it may be enhanced and be kept beyond
the reach of meritorious but poor students. Such is the financial and political
power of our minority elite community in Indian democracy! These elite
institutions are already privatised and commercialised while the government
claims that they are under their control. The huge fees arbitrarily charged by
the professional institutes run by the central government like the IIMs, IITs
and the central government run medical colleges including AIIMS is a fraud on
our countrymen. They belong to Indian taxpayers but by artificially keeping the
fees high the government has intentionally kept them away from the largest
section of the population. The logic that Indian banks give education loans is a
myth because without collateral security only the rich and VVIPs can get such
loans and in many cases such advances to the children of these well connected
people are never collected by banks thus adding to the banks’ non-performing
assets. It has been discussed so many times in both Parliament and in the press
but under pressure from industry and business, these politicians willingly kept
these elite organisations out of the bounds of the vast majority of the people
of this country. These organisations are developed as learning centres
exclusively for the children of those rich families who do not want to send
their children to foreign countries, where a MBA degree is much more expensive.
So these institutions cater to need of mainly rich families of India and this
practice should have stopped some 10/12 years back when such fees were enhanced
and made this country a laughing stock in the poor developing world. Ordinary
students never have the courage of joining these organisations.

The same ex-Professor of Allahabad University claimed in the
same interview that to become an Indian Administrative Services officer the
minimum qualification is graduation and one can get it by paying Rs 16 to Rs 20
per month as fees. The honourable minister has tremendous faith in the IAS cadre
for efficient management! The minister is misguiding people and not telling the
truth. No child today can get a degree anywhere in India paying only Rs 16 per
month. Every child is forced to pay, irrespective of his/her capacity, the
rising cost of higher education as the University Grants Commission, since the
economic reform was introduced in the early nineties, refused to shoulder higher
costs due to the normal pay revision of teachers and karmacharis in 1986 and
1996. The money for science laboratories, with required equipment and materials,
library books and journals are to be procured from the students. Such persons
are voters of the country and educating them is the responsibility of the state
and not of their parents. When we have agreed to pay pensions to an MP or MLA if
he/she is elected, irrespective of tenure, then why should not the education
expenses of the country’s citizens be the headache of the state? The UGC was
declared bankrupt by the Ministry of HRD under instructions from the World Bank
There is a proposal to bring in a new organisation with new name in place of the
UGC. Joshi claims that (surprisingly in the entire interview he was using the
alphabet ‘I’ instead of HRD ministry) he has no dearth of funds, but why
then the UGC is telling us every day that those who want higher education should
bring in money, otherwise they should not enter into any University. The
privatisation and commercialisation of higher education is an ongoing process as
per the World Bank’s directive, and the Vajpayee government is implementing it
as a faithful servant of this imperialist institution. Prof. Joshi knows
everything but is trying to confuse the countrymen. Whenever we discuss the
financial resources of India’s higher education, the government flatly refuses
to inform the people despite the existence of the ‘Right to Information Act’.
It rather tries to confuse people by telling them that so many million pupils
are outside of the elementary education system and that the government does not
have money to spare for higher education.. Now elementary education is a
fundamental right of children and the HRD ministry will have to come out with
better excuses for its avoiding its constitutional responsibility. Then how is
it that for the first time in the history of India the present education
minister claims that there is no dearth of financial resources with the
government? This is also reflected in the interim budget where allocation for
his ministry was slashed in a year when the Vajpayee government is ‘shining’
and willingly ignored all norms of public financial prudence which is the
minimum requirement of any responsible civilised government. It was never
experienced in the past 5 decades. About the solvency of the MHRD, the following
press report is sufficient. In Economic Times dated 5.11.2003, it is
reported that more than 2.38 crore children were out of school. The MHRD
requires Rs 32000 crores to implement the Sarva Shiksha Programme (Education for
all), but it received only Rs 17000 crores. It is looking to the World Bank, the
DFID and the European Commission for funds. Is it not humiliating for an
independent country with more than one billion population? Here ministers spend
lakhs on entertainment in 5 star hotels with their family members and friends
and ask the concerned public sector unit to foot the bill. In the
nineteen-fifties more money per head was spent on elementary education than
today!

To appease his RSS bosses of Nagpur this learned minister of
Sri Vajpayee was very busy for long five years rewriting history textbooks for
school children with all fabricated materials and to introduce unscientific
subjects like palmistry, face-reading and astrology etc. in the University
curricula. His loyal secretaries from the IAS, specialised in less
administration but more sycophancy, were sleeping till CAT papers were leaked at
the end of 2003. To gain cheap popularity before election they are trying to
recreate the image of a hopeless, confused and communal minister as
people-friendly and who wants only ‘merit and equity’ to prevail in
admission to professional courses.

Prof. Joshi knows better than any one else that his employer,
the Prime Minister of India appointed a committee, of M/S Anil Ambani selling
mobile phones and Kumaramangalam Birla selling cement, on the restructuring of
higher education and in their report they clearly brought out how our higher
education should be privatised and commercialised and why the government should
at an early date wash its hands of the country’s higher education market. To
them education is as much a commodity as the petro-products of Reliance or
Grashim suitings. Indian and foreign business houses should be allowed
exclusively to deal in education and let the students pay and purchase education
from the market. This restructuring process started long back in our country, it
got momentum in the early nineties and now the BJP government has agreed to
withdraw completely first from the field of higher education and later from the
rest of education. Prof. Joshi’s dramas are all election gimmicks. India’s
international creditors and India’s big business houses don’t want that our
children from poor families should receive higher education and challenge the
‘hire and fire’ policies of profit hungry businessmen. They are afraid of
the liberal higher education policy of the past, which resulted in so many mass
movements challenging the imperialists' destructive policies through the MNCs
of the world. Organisations like the World Social Forum are giving them
sleepless nights throughout the globe and such protests will accelerate as more
and more people sink every day into depthless poverty, diseases and illiteracy.

Since 1992 the central government has refused to follow the
Acts passed by Parliament under which the central universities came into
existence. These central universities did not allow the UGC to interfere in the
day-to-day teaching programmes and discussions on academic matters. The students
of Indian universities were challenging their counterparts in the rest of the
world. This upset the commercial ventures outside India and they used the World
Bank and other funding organisations to pressurise Indian politicians not to use
government money for higher education. They lured India with huge funding for
elementary education where some millions of children are kept outside the
schools’ boundary though the right to education is a fundamental right. The
government of India is feeling happy about earning huge foreign exchange from
the export of the information and technology sector but that could never have
happened without the contribution of Indian Universities in producing excellent
students while charging nominal fees from all sections of society. Now call
centres are growing everywhere throughout the country and Indians are doing this
new assignment with efficiency and dedication and that is possible because these
boys and girls in lakhs were educated in our colleges and that too in the
English medium. These ministers and IAS officers were used by vested interests
to make these institutions of higher learning sick. No central university today
can function without taking day-to-day instructions from a junior IAS officer of
the HRD ministry who is ordered to control these Universities. It is simply a
fascist raj in the administration of higher education in the 21st Century. It
hardly matters what is the academic background of these petty officers and do
they differentiate between administering a sabzi mandi (wholesale vegetable
market) and an institution of higher learning. The most unfortunate part is that
the HRD Ministry’s representatives who are sent to these institutions as
Vice-Chancellors are so selfish and careerist that they prefer to crawl before
the minister when ordered to walk. Most of these Universities are having big and
beautiful buildings, but the majority of the teachers are no longer supposed to
carry on independent teaching and research, they are asked to wait and see and
simply behave as ‘his master’s voice’. Sycophancy in higher education
among the teaching community has destroyed the required dedication and
commitment to teaching and research. The most ugly form of fascist practices are
being performed within the campuses and Indian scholars are killed in such a
suffocating atmosphere. We have heard of hourly wage earners in the retail
outlets in USA and Europe, in Indian Universities during the last 10/12 years,
teachers are no longer appointed on a long term basis with service safeguards,
rather they are appointed on an hourly basis, because there is no money to pay
for the full time employment of teachers. The IAS officers feel they should
fully exploit the unemployment situation in the country and in that process may
save some pence. These politicians with the help of their loyal IAS secretaries
in order to achieve their petty short term self interests have consigned India’s
glorious higher education structure to the graveyard. It took so many decades of
dedicated and fully committed hard work by thousands of teachers of the entire
country after independence to come to such world class standard in higher
education and challenge the rest of the world with the growth of our ‘knowledge
technology’. The present planned creation of a chaotic situation serves the
purpose of so many foreign universities who were facing tough competition from
the students produced by Indian Universities paying so called ‘Rs 16 per month
fees’. The privatisation and commercialisation policy in higher education has
destroyed the basic concept of education of this country and both the Congress
and BJP Govt. have finally hammered nails in the coffin of India’s higher
education. Vajpayee should be grateful to his highly learned minister!

The crucial issue is public health. The Vajpayee government
is telling people that more institutions like the All-India Institute of Medical
Science will be started if they are voted back to power. However, they are not
telling us about the actual achievements of this government so far as public
health care is concerned. Due to the WTO’s regulations and the Intellectual
Property Rights restrictions, the manufacturing of drugs is virtually controlled
by a limited number of MNCs. and they are charging excessive prices for
essential drugs in the developing countries compared to what they charge for the
same drugs in their own countries. Our main disease is not AIDS as claimed by
the foreign lobbyists, they are still to-day the age-old diseases like TB,
malaria and the various diseases related to contaminated water and unhygienic
and filthy living conditions. We are not mentioning heart diseases because there
are no Intensive Care Units even in many district hospitals of the country. A
visit to any government hospital anywhere in the country will show that there is
no government in the entire country so far as public health care is concerned.
That is probably why in the election eve propaganda by the NDA government one is
told of the roads to be connected rather than how many patients and dogs sleep
together even in the maternity sections of government hospitals with new born
children. Without a single exception in all governments in the entire country,
what is missing are doctors, nurses, medicines and essential medical equipment.
In many government hospitals the overall environment is one of utter
hopelessness and total indiscipline. Hospital authorities are not only
inefficient but totally indifferent. No minister in India will dare to accept
treatment from any government hospital after private hospitals and nursing homes
were established. So safely we can say that our public hospitals are virtually
waiting rooms like those in railway stations where patients wait for the journey
to the cremation grounds. Only a lucky few can dare to go back home properly
cured. We went to Sasaram in Bihar recently from where Babu Jagjivan Ram was a
regular elected member to the Lok Sabha. When we visited the sub-divisional
hospital with a patient, we were told that the doctor on duty was available only
in his nursing home located just on the other side of the road. You go to AIIMS,
it has a beautiful structure but shamelessly follows two types of treatment, one is
hundred percent free, for people like MPs and Ministers and the other is the
humiliating, tiring, cumbersome and costly treatment for common men and women
who really finance these organisations through taxes. The Vajpayee government
wants to commercialise its services slowly but cleverly, but the teachers,
students and para medical staff totally oppose such move and demand that it
should be exclusively kept for needy patients according to objectives of its
Constitution. Recently the government is imposing every day new and additional
charges for the treatment in AIIMS despite strong protests from a section of the
doctors and staff of AIIMS. Due to the continuous pressure from World Bank, the
day is not far away that free treatment of various diseases will be a matter of
history and the worst sufferers will be the poor people who cannot afford to
pay. Recently the government of India invited the President of Brazil to the 26th
January function. Sri Vajpayee must be knowing that though Brazil is one of the
developing countries and helped India to fight the developed countries in the
latest meeting of WTO at Cancun, over the years it has developed a very
satisfactory free of cost public health care system for the entire population.
If there is a political will one can do it, in India we have it only for the
elected members and ex-members of parliament and state legislatures. Thus
education and health care are no longer of any concern of our society and if one
is unable to pay the increasing cost of these services as a citizen and
responsible voter he/she is simply forgotten and consigned to the dustbin. How
long this will go on? An attempt was made above to discuss briefly how
globalisation with its ugly form resulted in untold miseries to the poor who are
either unemployed or underemployed and can’t dream to send their children to
paid schools and/or try to get medical aid free of cost simply because they can’t
afford to pay for these services. Can we claim that we live in a civilised
society? We show below the respective contributions of Centre and States on social
sector expenditures during the reform period.

Share of Centre and States on Social Sector Expenditure

Social Sector

% share in total expenditure
(Centre+ States)

% share of total budgetary allocation

Year

Centre

States

Centre

States

Overall:

1990-91

9.91

90.09

3.13

32.89

1995-96

11.74

88.26

4.32

32.57

2003-04 (BE)

13.76

86.24

5.06

25.31

Education:

1990-91

7.49

92.51

1.22

17.38

1995-96

9.22

90.78

1.67

16.55

2003-04 (BE)

12.58

87.42

2.33

12.91

Medical:

1990-91

6.44

93.56

0.32

5.29

1995-96

9.08

90.92

0.40

4.03

2003-04 (BE)

11.19

88.81

0.48

3.04

Water supply and sanitation:

1990-91

4.55

95.45

0.09

2.19

1995-96

9.14

90.86

0.23

2.27

2003-04 (BE)

7.99

92.01

0.23

2.16

Interest payment and servicing of debt:

1990-91

71.27

28.73

29.21

12.06

1995-96

69.52

30.48

35.77

15.13

2003-04 (BE)

60.17

39.83

33.65

21.45

Police:

1990-91

28.19

71.81

1.48

4.37

1995-96

30.28

69.72

1.95

4.52

2003-04 (BE)

33.30

66.70

2.14

3.43

Economic Times, 1.12.2003

It is peculiar that according to the sharing of
responsibilities between the Centre and the States mentioned in the
Constitution, the Centre has limited responsibility with unlimited financial
resources. Its main responsibility is to safeguard the country from foreign
aggression, so it has every year a huge defence budget. Every transaction in
this ministry is kept under the carpet on the grounds of the ‘security’ of
the country. The Tehelka sting operation punctured that myth of ‘security’
and exposed the rampant corruption in defence deals. The minister concerned is
under a cloud of suspicion. Even then last year the ministry could not spend
around Rs 5000 crores which helped Vajpayee to show a reduced fiscal deficit.
The states on the other hand are small in size but they are under continuous
pressure from the people to satisfy all the demands of the people residing in
that state: starting from providing hospitals, schools, roads, drinking water,
shelter and the maintenance of law and order etc. The state governments are
totally bankrupt, they hardly have any financial resources other than for the
payment of salaries to the employees. The Centre can borrow both from the
international market and /or print notes to meet its financial obligations. The
states are given limited borrowing powers as if they are foreign countries.
Finance Commissions are appointed every five years to remove imbalances in
financial resources. Members of the Commission are appointed by the Centre and
the states are allowed to submit memoranda only, the relationship between the
Centre and States on this particular issue is that of a donor and that of a
receiver. During the present phase of coalition politics, the states tend to
support the majority party in the Parliament so that they get some extra goodies
from the Centre, Andhra Pradesh politics is entirely based on such blackmail
politics. As soon as the Tamil Nadu chief minister agreed to join the NDA before
the ensuing Lok Sabha poll, she demanded a fabulous price from the centre and it
has already paid the first instalment of this ransom. States ruled by opposition
parties may bark and fight against the centre, but the Centre just ignores the
justified demands of the people of those states. Thus we may talk of development
of the country, federal structure, democracy etc., but the Indian Constitution
explicitly encourages dependence of states on the Centre and encourages divisive
tendencies.

The states’ total budgetary expenditure has grown by an
annual compound rate of 15 percent during the last 14 years, from 1990-91 to
2003-04, their expenditure on social sector has increased by about 12.5 percent
during the same period. The share of social sector in the states’ total
expenditure as a result has declined from 32.9 percent in 1990-01 to 25.3
percent in 2003-04. The Centre on the other hand could find only 5 percent for
budgetary expenditure for the social sector in the 2003-04 budget against 3
percent in 1990-91 and that is mainly used in paying salary to babus and the
maintenance of beautiful buildings in which these non functional ministries are
located. In 2003-04 the centre proposed to spend around 3.04 per cent of its
budgetary resources on education, health and water supply and sanitation when
the states proposed around 18.11 percent. On the other hand, Centre will spend
around 2.14 percent of it budget on police in 2003-04, while the states’ share
comes to 3.43 percent, a decline of 0.93 percent over 1990-91. One does not
understand why the Centre kept on increasing the numbers of the police force
when law and order is specifically the responsibility of the states. This
Central police force never acts according to demand of the situation in the
states, rather it is used to fulfill sectarian political purposes. During the
Gujarat massacres when the local police was helping anti-social elements, there
was no Central police to safeguard the life and property of the state sponsored
killings. If the Central police force is disbanded, the saved money may be
transferred to the social sector. Another structural bottleneck in the country’s
finance is that both the Centre and states are already declared bankrupt. Prof.
Joshi may shout from the roof tops that there is no dearth of money, the HRD
ministry is floating on funds etc., but his secretaries are sent regularly to
foreign countries with broken pots to collect funds to finance so many foreign
funded projects. One simple case is that of the mid-day meal. Will the ministry
tell people how many children are getting the benefit of this scheme and how
many are waiting to get this benefit? They don’t have money to cook food!

Mr Vajpayee may ‘feel good’ that the elections have given
him a golden opportunity to spend more than Rs 500 crores of the taxpayers’
money on false and ugly designed costly coloured advertisements, but the
pictures shown daily in the media of lakhs of able bodied ladies and men fleeing
from villages in western Maharashtra due to continuous drought for four long
years cannot be hidden from people. In ‘shining India’ why do children and
ladies have to walk every day 3 to 4 kilometres to bring a bucket of drinking
water even before summer started in the country. Will they excuse such an
irresponsible Prime Minister interested only to grab the chair and feeling no
concern for those hapless drought affected people. Are they supposed to work for
12 long hours per day for breaking stones in the scorching sun to get a paltry
sum of money and some kilograms of grain? After informing the President to
dissolve parliament, his Finance Minister and Commerce Minister are so happy
that they have liberally bribed their vote bank with uncalled for financial
concessions of more than Rs one lakh crores. The total provisions for the social
sector in 2003-04 by the Centre was around Rs 22217 crores or hardly 5 percent
of the budget, is it not a criminal offence to neglect its constitutional
responsibility to spend money on education, health and water supply, rather than
waste national resources for the unproductive purposes of pampering a particular
political party’s votebank. The HRD ministry’s budget for 2004-05 is already
reduced in comparison to last year. Will Indian democracy forget such
irresponsible behaviour of a government? With this vision they pretend to rule
the country of more than a billion people for decades to come!